I must have been out on the back forty when it happened. Oh yeah, I’d seen it coming decades ago and told everyone who would listen but that was nobody. Somehow the artist in this community went from social nonentity, a dreamy wastrel who won’t take a job to cultural superhero whose ideas, utterances, and public creations are inviolate, beyond community approval, official sanction, and you better not paint over nothing even if you own it. Where was I?
Where was everyone else? Some local booking agent all of a sudden is contracting with world-trotting gunslingers who ride into town, emblazon their enormous creative expressions on any convenient blankness, and on their way rejoicing while the community sorts out conflicting feelings about what they’ve left behind. I personally couldn’t complain about any of it because this public painting asks all the right questions, and citizens have to sort out their own answers. It represents a mighty transition, like when evolution turns a corner.
Public painting itself doesn’t have a great future. For one thing there’s only so many blank walls that face the public and they’ll soon be covered, and then there’s the technical side. What does it take to prep a concrete or brick wall for a painted image and did they all do it? In any case, paintings normally shouldn’t be left outside in all sorts of weather, and without regular maintenance they won’t last long. It doesn’t matter. They will have done their job and faded away.
This infusion of international euro-pop mentality will arouse an awareness of what’s already here, what has been here all along, but off the view screen, under the radar, out of mind. These very large paintings are immensely impractical from the individual’s point of view -- they can’t be moved or even seen except when parking, but regular sized paintings in galleries, or for sale in restaurants and salons, can be taken home and hung in the living room.
From this jump-start, artists will rise in the community mind from being the decorators of public utilities and providers of raw material for charity auctions to serious self-employed contributors. The quirky genius who flaunts society’s norms is slightly beyond the ambition of most artists, and simply being included in community life would satisfy many. All the grating controversy that accompanies public art is overcome when someone buys a piece and expresses their own opinion through ownership.
Stars align, ancient locks begin to turn, and some new state of community self-concept is at hand, as has already been seen in several quarters. Art is about self-concept first of all, and owning some can ease the friction all this change can cause. Outside ‘public’ art will blossom and fade but the seed will germinate indoors, all around the town.
2 comments:
Potential longevity issues aside, I've been very happy to see the murals around Lexington. It finally addresses something the author of the 1931 Comprehensive Plan for Lexington decried at the time--a lack of public art. If it builds more awareness and appreciation for the artists who already live there, I'm all for it. It's like trying to tell your kid something they need to hear but won't listen to you, but then the kid hears and understands it perfectly when a total stranger says the exact same thing.
I wouldn't complain if murals with a more strategic integration into the public sphere would happen. Location is key, and audience would follow suit. Not that I take any issue with it, but I would prefer that to the random expression of artists from afar. Then again, this is art with minimal constraints, of course they need to meet the approval of building owners but beyond that, it's their wheel to spin. Also, I don't really see very much in these works that is truly edgy, or avant-garde, nor very provocative, which I thought was one of the tenants of the majority of street art, but that's a tangent for a different discussion.
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